Barriers Related to Minority-Owned Business Financing - Assignment Example

The paper "Barriers Related to Minority-Owned Business Financing" is a great example of a business assignment. Sonfield (2005) argues that defining the concept of a ‘minority business’ is a complex task. In a general term, the minority business can be defined as a business owned solely, or at least primarily, by members of a ‘minority group would constitute a ‘minority business’ However, there are arguments on defining the terminology of minority business and what elements should constitute them. Among practitioners and researchers, the debate on the definition has been going on for several years. In the USA ‘minority businessperson’ and ‘minority business’ are the generally used terms. ‘Ethnic’ is rarely used to describe a business, and, when used, this often refers to firms that focus very specifically on ethnic/cultural products or markets whereas ‘racial’ is virtually never used to describe a business.

Some researchers classify owners of businesses who are minorities, while others think that the conceptualization should be made at the community level which will become a more meaningful definition. In the literature, many studies relied on the definition of the business owners who are a minority or ethnic business. However, some look into the broader conceptualization of business owners involved in that community which is a minority business community or ethnic business community. The involvement can be heavily involved, less involved, or not at all involved in the community (Sonfield, 2005)

In recent studies, the conceptualization of community has been more complex. Not only the community in which business owners involved, but also there are many other contextual factors such as culture, geographic locality, labor markets, institutional situation, and business sectors are considered as “mixed embeddedness” perspective. In addition, cultural categorization should include cultural issues as well as biological racial arguments (Kloosterman et al. 1999, Barrett et al. 2001, Ram and Smallbone 2003, Gunaratnum 2003, Sonfield, 2005).